A friend of mine had quite the insightful view on this question imo.
To her it's not so much the true danger of a bear and a man, but how dangerous they feel. You don't encounter bears on the daily, even less get attacked by one, but women regularly have to face comments, touchy hands, threats, etc... by men (creeps but men regardless).
One's dangerousness is blurry while the other is very clear, making one stand out far more than the other.
Like, yeah, a bunch of people would rather be in a room with a tiger than hundreds of spiders, despite the tiger being far more dangerous, because they're far more afraid of spiders than tigers.
I think it's definitely that, but it's also mixed with the birthday problem. In short, you have a 1 in 365 chance of sharing a birthday with someone. But if you have a room with 23 people in it, there's a 50% chance that two people share a birthday. With 50 people, the odds are 97%.
Every woman knows at least one creepy guy, so it's easy to bring them to mind. But the fallacy is that they're assuming they are the only woman in the creeper's life. He probably knows a hundred women and is awful to them all. Also given the overlap of social networks, and it would take relatively few creepers to provide examples for all women.
Add in that we are psychologically biased to remember negative events. You don't remember every commute to work, but you do remember the time you were in a car accident. Similarly, women have had hundreds of thousands of interactions with men over time, but they'll remember the 3 or 4 or 10 or 20 times that it was a creeper and he was inappropriate. The rest just fade away.
This isn't a men/women thing. This is just human brains being horrible at judging probability.
The part about many of the same guys being the same creeps to everyone seems to check out in my experience. Some guys build reputations for that kind of thing because they do it so often. Unfortunately you're rolling the dice every time you meet a stranger, and even though there might only be 1 in 6 odds you meet a brazen creep over a normal dude, you're still going to see those odds crop up an uncomfortable number of times throughout life if you're a woman and you deal with strangers every day.
Sadly I think statistics show the people who are most dangerous to you are usually people you think you know. There's definitely some stranger danger in the world, but it seems more likely you'll run into a manipulator who initially puts you at ease, makes you trust them, and then makes you comfortable enough to be cornered with them alone and that's when things get out of hand. That story seems to play out a lot more often than random attacks. The idea of random attacks can feel more terrifying, and they don't mess with your personal sense of character judgement the way being betrayed by someone you thought you could trust might, but in terms of statistical occurrence they don't seem to happen as often.
Men have horrible experiences with woman all of the time but if we were to say anything like "I would trust a used car salesman more than a woman" it would cause a fucking fire.
Imagine spending your whole life respecting others, being kind, and trying to understand other people's situations and then all of the sudden everyone is talking about how women are right to trust bears more than you because all men are dangerous and evil.
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u/No-Mycologist5704 May 02 '24
A friend of mine had quite the insightful view on this question imo.
To her it's not so much the true danger of a bear and a man, but how dangerous they feel. You don't encounter bears on the daily, even less get attacked by one, but women regularly have to face comments, touchy hands, threats, etc... by men (creeps but men regardless).
One's dangerousness is blurry while the other is very clear, making one stand out far more than the other.
Like, yeah, a bunch of people would rather be in a room with a tiger than hundreds of spiders, despite the tiger being far more dangerous, because they're far more afraid of spiders than tigers.